So, farewell then, royal hugs and shaking hands—for now.
This week, Prince Charles, Camilla, Prince William, Sophie Wessex, Prince Edward and Princess Anne all made their first public outings in three months, giving them and us the first glimpse at what their new lives as post-COVID royals could look like.
The short and rather depressing answer is that, like almost everything else, being a royal is likely to be a lot less fun in the new world than it was in the old.
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And the prospect of any royal being made to dance in the street with a local in the next couple of years looks slender indeed.
The return to work was led by the future king and his wife, who broke a three-month spell of isolation at their home in Scotland to visit the Gloucestershire Royal Hospital on Tuesday—and then received French President Emmanuel Macron in London on Thursday.
On the other side of the country, Prince William, 37, made a brief visit, again focused on health workers, visiting the King’s Lynn ambulance station at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital.
The synchronized visits represented the first time since March 23, when the family attended the Commonwealth service in London (which was memorable for being Harry and Meghan’s last public appearance as full-fledged royals) that the royals have been seen in the flesh in public—as opposed to on the other end of a video call.
It was notable that, in a carefully staged piece of hierarchical messaging, the Queen led the way. On Saturday last week Elizabeth made a quasi-public appearance, being filmed as she was honored by guardsmen for birthday, in a scaled-down, bijou trooping of the colour at Windsor Castle.
Princess Anne, the Queen’s daughter, and Sophie Wessex and her husband, the Queen’s youngest son Prince Edward, also carried out official engagements during the week, yet another sign that the royal team is keen to get back in the public view.
Anne met squaddies at a military barracks, while Sophie and Edward were keeping the focus on health-care workers with a visit to Frimley Park Hospital in Surrey. Sophie has a strong connection with the hospital having given birth to her children there and the couple delivered meals for the staff.
All of last week’s engagements provided many clues as to how the royals will seek to remain relevant and part of the national conversation, even while most of them are, by virtue of their age, among the more vulnerable members of the population.
However, there are high hopes behind palace walls that Charles, who got the virus early on and was quite unwell, may now have some immunity.
The first point that was very clear is that, just like all the rest of us, the royal family will be moving to a contactless social protocol.
Charles, 71, was one of the first public figures to make a point of abandoning the time-honored ritual of the handshake, trading it instead for a ‘Namaste”-style, steepled fingers greeting. Charles was first pictured using this greeting as far back as March 11 at the Prince’s Trust awards.
Dropping the public handshaking will be less of a struggle for the Queen, who does not shake hands with significant numbers of the public anyway on her walkabouts, and is now unlikely to be going on those walkabouts anyway.
And royal PPE can be classy. In one of her final public appearances before the lockdown, an investiture ceremony at Buckingham Palace, the Queen wore white gloves, and while it is almost impossible to imagine Her Majesty meeting and greeting significant numbers of members of the public again, it is completely impossible to imagine her doing so without gloves.
There will likely be no flowers handed to the Queen directly; indeed, it was interesting to note that Camilla was not handed any flowers during her visit to the hospital on Tuesday. Presenting royals with small gifts was also a jolly habit enjoyed by some members of the public that will now presumably be discouraged, as it has been shown that the virus can be transmitted by objects.
It was also relevant to note that all three of the occasions were conducted outside in their entirety. Some royals may never see the inside of a provincial town hall again.
Of course one of the most important functions of the royals is to set a good example in matters of national expedience, and in this sense it was very reassuring to see Prince William checking his own temperature before visiting the ambulance station yesterday.
Some members of the royal family have been known to complain about the amount of time they are often expected to spend at the locations they visit.
This likely won’t be a problem this year at least; all of the visits that took place this week were brief, clocking in at less than 30 minutes, and this is likely to be a feature of all royal work going forward. Visits that might previously have lasted an hour or more will be wrapped up much more quickly.
One notable point is that none of the royals wore masks, a marked contrast to Prince Albert of Monaco, who was pictured this week wearing a rather chic black mask, embroidered with the principality’s flag as he attended the funeral of an elderly cousin (his wife Charlene looked particularly devastating).
That there is even a debate about the efficacy of mass mask-wearing has been one of the many extraordinary features of the pandemic. While it would seem innately logical to most people that wearing a mask will help prevent transmission of a disease that is largely believed to be spread by droplets exhaled from the body, resistance to masks, particularly in the U.K., is widespread.
Therefore one can quite understand why the royals may have decided, for now, that they will not be wearing masks, but pressure is building for the adoption of masks as a matter of course across Britain. Just this week, masks were finally made compulsory on most forms of British public transport, and the World Health Organization (WHO) states that non-medical face coverings should be worn in public where social distancing is not possible.
It seems inevitable that the guidance around masks will change and their use in a wide variety of settings will come to be seen as the healthy and considerate thing to do, at which point the royals will almost certainly start wearing them.
